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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

Again I found a movie that makes me question my own ideas as a filmmaker. Havoc ( directed by Gareth Evans ) is so stylized and fucking awesome that they had to go a CGI route for a lot of the shots to even be possible in the first place. Which created a similar situation, which I discussed in my review of Shazam! 2.

A lot of people, rightfully so, had issues with the CGI cars in the film, especially with the opening chase sequence, which looks, as some pointed out as an expensive video-game cut-scene, rather than a scene in a proper movie.

The scene in question is weird, but the CGI cars are nowhere near as bad as the cars in Shazam! 2. There is a lot of tone to the shots in Havoc making those shots, with the CGI cars, almost work. The main issue I and other people who know a thing or two about CGI see in these cars is their stupidly unnatural motion. They move almost like cars in Moria's Race or something. This is not how real cars move.

I do not think that those cars were CGI just to save costs. Evans is known for going over the top with his action. Hell, his Raid films sole concept is the fact that they are over-the-top action films. So it is possible that those cars were rendered on a computer to realize a vision Evans had in his head. And based on the rest of the action in the film, he probably wanted the cars to be a little extra-extreme.

People like James Cameron and others show time and time again that CGI ( if done correctly ) can look extremely realistic. If you understand what you are doing, you can fool the audience. But I don't think Evans cared about being realistic. He cared about being over-the-top. And therefor cars should accelerate unnaturally fast and spin around unnaturally spectacularly and so on and so forth. And those physics violations are not possible in real life. Therefor CGI. And therefor the CGI feels like CGI.

A similar level of cartoony bullshit is happening in the first Michael Bay produced 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie ( that is maybe directed by Jonathan Liebesman, a lot of people are still thinking Bay actually directed it. ). There a stupid scene down a snowy mountain, with a semi-truck and bad guys on off road vehicles and stuff. And everything is so intensely insane, that you cannot hate on it. Maybe this is how Evans saw the action in Havoc. It's just probably a bit weird to do this kind of shit in what supposed to be a "greedy" realistic movie about police stuff. So people felt weird about it.

I personally kind of dig the opening scene in Havoc. And that once again makes me think that I might be not fit for making a "greedy" police movie ( for context, read the Shazam! 2 review linked above ).

As a whole the film feels like an attempt at bringing the style of John Woo into Hollywood, since Woo himself toned his own style down for his American made pictures. Havoc feels a bit like the Hong Kong Woo classics The Killer and Hard Boiled. A lot of particles going off all at the same time. Not Bay explosions. Woo explosions. Sparkles everywhere. Operatic, melodramatic deaths, with a lot of blood squibs. Broken glass, a lot and lot and lot of stunt-men are shot or killed in some other way. Every action scene is a fucking massacre. It's a bullet-meat-grinder the movie.

While the world of the film is greedy and depressing and all characters in the film are pretty much doomed to suffer, the film is kind of, sort of funny, in a Guy Ritchie / Tarantino kind of twisted way. Some of the violence shots actually invoked memories of Django Unchained or something along those lines. And some of the scenes feels ripped straight from Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or something.

Writer-Director Gareth Evans filled the film with insane amount of style. There is a shot with two subway trains crossing each other ( which is probably CGI ), which I thought had an amazing kind of flow to it that fits perfectly to this movie.

Tom Hardy plays this slightly shady cop who probably seen a bit too much. He is a little grumpy and disrespectful to his new partner Ellie ( Jessie Mei Li ). I think I fell in love with Ellie. From the first shot of her standing there all serious in a doorway of a bastard that just beat the shit out of his wife. Oh my fucking god! Her serious as fuck cute ass face! My mind had a short orgasmic blackout.

And she is a fucking bad-ass in this movie. Like yeah, there is Hardy and he is cool and stuff. But hardy is not cute. He frankly looks like shit. I think I should avoid ( or watch ASAP ) Ballerina ( which I still didn't watch ), because serious look on a cute female face does something to me psychologically.

Similar bullshit happened to be with Cailee Spaeny in Alien: Romulus, Matilda Lutz in Revenge, Isabela Merced in Transformers 5 and even with Millie Bobby Brown in the trailer of Godzilla 2 where she smacks the door all furiously ( I should probably watch that movie too ).

Another, similar bad-assery comes from the character of Quelin Sepulveda. She is this young girls stuck in a very bad situation and Hardy's character is kind of sort of forced to help her survive. But kind of sort of he wants to help her survive. But kind of sort of, she just can survive on her own, but the movie just throws a fucking rain of enemies on her, so she kind of sort of needs Hardy in the end of the day.

Timothy Olyphant is in it. You could say that he plays the villain. But the movie is written in such a way that everybody is a villain and a hero in the same time, depending on a situation. Sometimes he fights alongside Hardy, sometimes against Hardy. As I said, it is a bullet-meat-grinder of a movie. There is antagonism and protagonism going in all directions and in every which way.

I understand people who criticize aspects of the movie, like the car chase scene, and other bullshit that tickles their uncanny-valley in a wrong way, but honestly, the film is awesome and bombarding in every good way.

Happy Hacking!!!

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